Gaming & Culture —

XBLA Trenched brings mechs, co-op to tower defense

Trenched starts with tower defense, but you place your defenses with a giant …

The world of tower defense games is more varied than it may look, with interesting takes on the genre being released with some regularity. Anomaly showed us what would happen if we were the invading army, and now Trenched on the Xbox Live Arcade turns the standard cursor you would normally use to place your units into a giant, customizable weapons platform.

If I'm allowed a moment of understatement, this is a very nice addition to the game play.

The game takes place in an alternate reality World War I, and you patrol each map with your mech as you take out the waves of bad guys, laying down your turrets and other battlefield goodies. You also have to stomp over to the fallen enemies to pick up the "scrap," the material used to buy new defenses and upgrades.

This gives you both a direct and indirect interaction with the enemies, and the game comes to life in multiplayer, with more enemies coming at you as you increase the player count. As you fight, you'll be earning money to buy upgrades, and new weapons and items to use to customize your mech. Finding the right combination of parts and effective defense placement are both important if you want to get ahead.

The game does have a few problems, as I found it tricky to keep track of where the enemies were coming from. Some waves are announced on your heads-up display, while others aren't, for no apparent reason. I would go out to fight a swarm of the bad guys, only to find another group of enemies chewing on the building I was supposed to be protecting, without much of a peep from the game. A top-down map would have been useful in some situations.

Even with these minor annoyances, the game is a great time, especially when you invite friends along for the ride. This is a game that feels good, and puts enough hooks into the standard tower defense formula to keep you playing. For $15, this is a game you need to be playing. If you want to find some allies on the battlefield, hit up the thread about the game on our forum.

Played this over the weekend. Decent play. I totally agreed about the overhead map. I also found selecting my "trenche's"(<-my robot) "emplacements" (<-- towers you can build) a little confusing as the menus aren't particularly well laid out. Overall good value game though.

I really, really am loving Trenched. The one thing people may want to keep in mind is that I would not suggest it to anyone if you're planning to play solo. The game is insanely fun for multiplayer and is balanced around it -- trying to play solo won't really work on some of the later maps.

A bunch of the Ars regulars have been hip deep in it and loving it. Double Fine went to some great lengths to put together one hilarious package here and its fun as hell with a large co-op group.

The trenches themselves are fun to tinker with and put together some bad ass loadouts with over the top weaponry - humorous descriptions included (The Pancake Maker - Flattens everything - including pancakes) and they are sufficiently powerful enough to get anyone blood flowing (Use a trench equipped with 2 King Mortars strapped to it and tell me I am wrong!)

That's a negative, dozier77. No local co-op. And because of how fun the multiplayer is supposed to be, this gives me pause as I don't know anybody else who has this game. Though the link to Ars' forum members' teams gives me hope that I will in fact experience this game in its fullest.

I wasn't very interested in this game until I read one of the comments stating that it's developed by DoubleFine. I wonder if you could include a little header or sidebar which lists the developer, publisher and platforms and price for the games you review?

I thought the lack of an overhead map was a conscious decision. You have to be aware of what's coming in. New waves only get the HUD popup while they're coming onto the field and it's very easy to miss one in the heat of a fight with all the other HUD arrows crowding the edge of the screen. Co-op partners calling things out and towers places so that you can see their fire on hidden enemies both ease this threat.

Those things would've made the game even easier, and it's not really crying out to be easier. I've golded every mission without a huge effort.

While I trust Ben (though I lack a 360 so wouldn't be able to get this game, anyway), I grow weary of the mindset that somehow, simply because a game cost X amount, it's a "must-buy." I don't base my purchases on cost vs. fun. I just go by if I would like that particular type of game and if it's, indeed, a good game.

This isn't mean to be an attack on Ben, at all, just making the point that it's something I've been seeing a lot of these days in reviews of Indy games and it seems a bit useless to me.